DEVELOPMENT OF THE BRITISH-LIBRARY OPAC-97 - THE VALUE OF A USER-CENTERED APPROACH

This article reviews the development of the British Library's OPAC ser vices leading up to the launch of OPAC 97, offering access to nine mil lion bibliographic records, The article attempts to show the value of a user-centred approach in the project management involved in developi ng such a service as recommended by Human Computer Interaction (HCI) s tudies. Evaluation studies of the Online Catalogue, the Network OPAC, a web prototype interface and of OPAC 97 are reviewed briefly and the results discussed in relation to the OPAC 97 project. Although the OPA C 97 interface made use of various HCI recommendations, user feedback sometimes contradicted these in specific instances, revealing the valu e of detailed user evaluation in developing services.